Thursday Morning News

Apple released iOS 9 and watchOS 2 earlier this morning, only to pull the watchOS 2 release shortly after. Apple’s official statement on the matter, as reported by TechCrunch, says they discovered a last-minute bug which will take a little longer to fix, so while there are some (the lucky few, in my opinion) who upgraded, everyone gets to enjoy their non-coloured, first-party complications for another couple of days yet.

But even without watchOS 2, iOS 9 is still a significant iterative improvement over iOS 8. 9to5Mac runs through some of the headlining features of the release, with MacRumors also having their own screenshot gallery showing off some of the more important features.

If reviews are your thing, the only review of iOS 9 you need to read is from Federico Viticci, over at MacStories. The entire thing, written and edited entirely on an iPad, is available in paginated form over on the website, otherwise there’s also an eBook version if you want to spend a little more time with it. If you’re looking for an alternative, Rene Ritchie’s review of iOS 9 over at iMore is also worth checking out.

One of the biggest features of iOS 9 is content blockers, which are probably going to be used for tracking and ad blocking on the iOS platform. The Loop has a collection of a couple for you to try, and while it’s depressing to see how fast pages load using content blockers, Jason Snell over at Six Colors reminds us that blocking ads hurts the websites you read, and you should consider adding an exception for the websites that you want to support. For the record, AppleTalk doesn’t run ads. But if we did, we’d be in the same boat as everyone else: asking for an exception in your ad-blocker list.

One such content blocker is Peace by Marco Arment and powered by Ghostery. It’s a Marco app, so you know it’s going to be at least half-OK, and at $3.79 on the Australian App Store it’s also reasonably priced. There’s a review of Peace over on MacStories.

Ars Technica’s report of iOS 9 on the iPad 2, the oldest device to still support Apple’s latest mobile OS, starts things off by saying it isn’t worse than iOS 8. That’s a plus, I guess, but running iOS 9 on the iPad 2, given how many missing features it has, just seems like flogging that dead horse for just a little longer. Their story of iOS 9 on the iPhone 4S tells a similar story, but at least the latter has a Retina display.

MacRumors says you can use screen protectors with the new 3D Touch feature on the new iPhone 6s and 6s Plus. Evidently there’s some other kind of sorcery going on that means a screen protector doesn’t impede the force-sensing capabilities of the new iPhone.

Notable Replies

If reviews are your thing, the only review of iOS 9 you need to read is from Federico Viticci, over at MacStories. The entire thing, written and edited entirely on an iPad, is available in paginated form over on the website, otherwise there’s also an eBook version if you want to spend a little more time with it. If you’re looking for an alternative, Rene Ritchie’s review of iOS 9 over at iMore is also worth checking out.

Straight to Instapaper.

bennyling:

everyone gets to enjoy their non-coloured, first-party complications for another couple of days yet

Unless there's something in the code that prevents them from being installed on the watchOS 2 GM, there are still no apps with third-party complications. I wonder if Apple is holding those app updates until the official release.